EPILOGUE
Richard & Helene
Richard stood in the kitchen of his townhouse, watching the kettle steam. The house felt different now — quieter, calmer. Less like a monument to long workdays, more like a place someone actually lived.
He left the office early these days. Wendy, formidable, unflappable Wendy, had insisted he delegate properly or she'd "organise his life for him, permanently."
He suspected she wasn't joking.
At first, he'd worried about letting go. Then he started going home before six… and Helene quietly slipped into the spaces work used to fill.
He'd never expected to fall in love again — especially not with a woman who carried her own quiet history. But the more he learned about her, the more he admired her strength.
She told him, one soft evening, about Isabelle's father — a builder who'd fallen from unsafe scaffolding when Isabelle was only two. How the company he'd worked for had tried to cut corners. How he just didn't come home one day.
Helene had raised Isabelle alone. French teacher by day, cleaner by dawn and dusk. Richard had listened with aching respect, realising the steel beneath her gentleness had been forged in necessity, not ease.
"Do you ever slow down?" he asked her once.
She smiled. "Only when someone gives me a reason to."
He had the sudden, startling desire to be that reason.
His own past felt less sharp these days. The bitterness around Eleanor had softened — not because he'd forgotten, but because he finally saw what he'd missed. He'd worked too much. Missed too many dinners. Too many moments.
His children lived with him now; they talked more easily. He found himself laughing with them, listening to them, earning back the closeness he'd nearly lost.
Healing didn't arrive all at once. It crept in quietly, like morning light slipping through a window.
He carried two mugs of tea into the living room, where Helene sat curled on the sofa with a book in her lap. She looked up, a soft smile blooming — one she reserved only for him.
"Thank you," she said, taking the cup.
Richard sat beside her, their shoulders brushing. The warmth of her, the simple domesticity of it, felt like a gift he'd never expected to receive.
"I was thinking," he began, trying for casual, but failing spectacularly, "that one weekend… maybe we could take a little trip. Just the two of us. Anywhere you'd like."
Helene closed her book. "I would like that very much."
He exhaled — quietly, relieved, happy.
Outside, the evening light softened into gold. Inside, they sat close, sipping tea, letting the future unfold slowly between them.
Two people who had learned, in their own time, that love after loss wasn't only possible…
It could be better the second time around.
And in the small, gentle glow of this new beginning, Richard finally understood what Isabelle and Robert had learned:
Family could grow in unexpected directions.
Love could return in unexpected ways.
And sometimes — if you were lucky — life gave you a second chance just when you'd stopped expecting one.
~ End of book one ~